Friday, February 15, 2013

Caress of Twilight--chapter 9

Pick your poison, kids. Smashwords, Amazon, Barnes and Noble. READ IT AND ...uh...well, not weep. You're not supposed to cry during this book. But buy it! And read it! Please!

...back to the suck, I guess.

Here is the plot so far: Movie Star Fae Goddess asks Merry (...who is some kind of fertility goddess herself, I forgot that part) to come visit. Merry does. She confronts Movie Star Goddess's guards. Movie Star Goddess arrives in time to get insulted to her face.

This is chapter nine.

My three favorite book obsessions right now are John Dies At the End,Warm Bodies and Hunger Games.
By chapter nine in John Dies Dave and John have saved Las Vegas via shitty garage band rock, beaten a meat monster that wanted to confront a TV psychic and Dave is in the process of trying to buy a bratwerst from a haunted McDonalds. (...look. Just read the book)

By chapter nine in Warm Bodies R has had Julie for quite a while, they have bonded over Frank Sinatra and shitty canned pad thai and R's whole not-eating-Julie thing, they've been discovered by a gigantic spoiler, and he's starting to take her home.

By chapter nine in Hunger games, Peeta and Katniss are in the capitol, have gone through almost all of their training, have done the chariot ride, and are about to go into the inverviews. Peeta has asked to be coached seperately and Katniss is not taking it well.

In ALL of these (KICK ASS AWESOME) books, the plot has been established and advanced. In John Dies and Warm Bodies, the first act is over and we're clearly moving into the second. In Hunger Games, well, we're about two chapters away from Act two AKA the arena, if I remember right.

We do not even have a conflict in this book yet.

But now Maeve Reed is here, and she's going to tell Merry everything and we will move on with the plot now, right? Right?

*sigh*

So we get a long ass description of what Maeve Reed looks like, and what she's wearing, and how she's using magic to look human, and then how she looks like a supermodel, but it's not diet and excercise that does it, it's just how she looks.

NO SHIT, SHERLOCK. SHE'S USING MAGIC TO LOOK THAT WAY. OF COURSE SHE'S GONNA BE HOT.

I have said this before, I'm gonna say it again: NOBODY CARES WHAT YOUR CHARACTER LOOKS LIKE. At least not for four fucking paragraphs worth of material that are about to get blown out of the water anyway.

She says Ethan probably ought to leave if he feels that way.

Ethan says he didn't mean the Seelie court, because they are the "bringers of beauty and wishes."

AKA: The guys that humans believe do good things, as opposed to the ones with all the ugly monsters.

Yeah. Because it's not like the Fairy Queen in Tam Lin was paying a tithe to hell with human people now, is it? Oh wait, she was. And her allignment was never specified.

Another problem here is, LKH is mixing mythology without caring fuck-all for what she's doing. Seelie/Unseelie divisions are a scots thing. Like really awesome lace knitting, great whiskey and golf (...two out of three aren't bad) this belongs to Scotland. And given that you have to go into Norse mythology to find a paralelle (light/dark elves) I'm going to bet this division came from the east. The Sidhe, on the other hand, are Irish. And they're not divided, far as I can tell.

So she's trying to write this big paralelle for oppressed peoples, while ignoring how she's fucking up mythology (do not get me started on how EVERY FUCKING ONE of Merry's boys are a god from old Irish/Scots/Welsh mythology). You know, I got pissed off for Cassandra Clare borrowing everything but God from Christianity, including that bullshit with that church, so I'm going to get pissed off now too. Borrowing fairies and Sidhe and even the Seelie/Unseelie courts? I'd let that slide. But LKH is grabbing very specific gods and goddesses from three different pantheons and shoving them all together so that her main character can have sex with them. It'd be like Jerry B. Jenkins creating a self insert to screw Jesus, Mohammad and Krishna. And LKH, remember, is a card carrying pagan dabbling in both "Wicca" and Astaru. She should have more respect than this.

Faith is not a shiny object.

So Ethan leaves and Maeve is all like "I feel neglected without him" and Julian goes into full on pandering mode, rambling about how he'll never leave her side, yadda yadda yadda, and any chance that Maeve could have been a cool character goes down the fucking drain. It's not badass to watch someone who could probably obliterate you whine and complain that they just don't feel special enough.

And then Merry figures out that Maeve hired all these idiots to protect herself from Merry and Co. Because they are dangerous unseelie court Fae, and the book is basically chasing its own tail again, isn't it.

So now do we find out what the plot is?

Merry listens to Maeve's magic. Maeve watches them. Somehow Doyle indicates that Merry gets to be rude to Maeve. He does this through bizzare eye telepathy. Merry decides that she'll be so very rude, if she were in Faerie territory--because the home of a Goddess for fourty plus years obviously doesn't count--she'd get killed for insulting the other person and...

the chapter ends.

Next chapter will be the tenth chapter without a plot.

HOW do you write ten books, and then have your writing go this bad? It's like LKH died after Obsidian Butterfly and got replaced by a pod person. HOW DO YOU NOT REALIZE YOU'VE WRITTEN TEN CHAPTERS WITH NO PLOT? It's almost as bad as when Jerry B. Jenkins lost World War Three during Trib Force and Nicolae.

Ah, well. There's your chapter for today. And sadly we've got three more chapters of this to go. And trust me, when we find out what Maeve Reed wants? It's not worth it. Not at all.

I've probably mangled the spelling. It's the revival of the germanic religion. Odin, Thor, Loki, and so on. She discusses hunin and munin and ravens enough, and given that rune post on her blog it sounds like she uses a set related to Odin and company.

It isn't as well publicized as wicca far as I know. I first read about it in a john ringo novel. Not ghost, thank God.

Eh, a lot of pagans use runes for divination without identifying as Heathens. And most of us are respectful and/or mindful of other pantheons than the one we primarily work with. The Norse gods are pretty badass so it stands to reason that she'd namedrop the All-Father and his ravens whenever possible.

Faith is TOTALLY a shiny object to LKH. But, of course, we knew that already from the crap she posts.

I haven't read Jon Dies or Warm Bodies, but THG are indeed made of awesome and run circles around anything LKH has churned out. Pacing is definitely key in a great story, and I doubt it happens by accident. I'm sure that Suzanne Collins didn't just automatically crank out such a slick, streamlined plot...there were probably plenty of scenes that had to be tweaked or cut to make everything flow the way that it does.

THIS IS WHY YOU NEED EDITS, LKH!!!

And it hugely amuses me that she tries to make Maeve Reed look like a spoiled, petulant little princess for whining about not being special enough, when the main gist of this series is all about what a Special Snowflake Merry is.